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Text Acts by Francis Booth
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 2: AU DÉBUT DE SIÈCLE Arthur Schnitzler Reigen Dream Story Henri Barbusse Hell Pierre Louÿs The Young Girl’s Handbook Three Daughters of their Mother Pybrac Guillaume Apollinaire The Eleven Thousand Rods The Exploits of a Young Don Juan Raymond Radiguet The Devil in the Flesh Aleister Crowley The Nameless Novel Paul Leppin Daniel Jesus Severin’s Road to Darkness Blaugast CHAPTER 3: OBELISK PRESS Frank Harris My Life and Loves DH Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer The World of Sex Lawrence Durrell The Black Book CHAPTER 4: SEX AND SURREALISM Researches Into Sexuality Louis Aragon Irène’s C*** 1929 Robert Desnos On Eroticism Liberty or Love The Devil’s Popess Salvador Dalí Rêverie CHAPTER 5: LA PHILOSOPHIE DANS LE BOUDOIR Pierre Klossowski: Sade My Neighbour Maurice Blanchot: Sade’s Reason Simone de Beauvoir: Must We Burn Sade? Gilles Deleuze: Coldness and Cruelty Roland Barthes: Sade, Fourier, Loyola Angela Carter: The Sadeian Woman Georges Bataille Story of the Eye The Solar Anus Madame Edwarda The Little One The Dead Man My Mother
CHAPTER 6: OLYMPIA PRESS 'Selena Warberg' (Diane Bataille) The Whip Angels ‘Jean de Berg’ (Catherine Robbe-Grillet) The Image 'Pauline Réage' (Anne Desclos) Story of O ‘Harriet Daimler’ (Iris Owens) Darling Innocence The Organisation The Woman Thing The Pleasure Thieves ‘Louise Walbrook’ (Edith Templeton) Gordon Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers The Thief's Journal Vladimir Nabokov Lolita Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg Candy CHAPTER 7: SEX AND THE NEW NOVEL Alain Robbe-Grillet A Sentimental Novel Marguerite Duras The Ravishing of Lol Stein The Lover The Malady of Death
CHAPTER 8: ’PATAPHYSIQUE/OULIPO ÉROTIQUE ‘Sally Mara’ (Raymond Queneau) We Always Treat Women Too Well ‘Vernon Sullivan’ (Boris Vian) I Spit On Your Graves Harry Mathews Singular Pleasures CHAPTER 9: MY SECRET GARDEN: FRENCH Colette The Pure and the Impure Violette Leduc Thérèse and Isabelle Gabrielle Wittkop The Necrophiliac CHAPTER 10: MY SECRET GARDEN: ENGLISH Anaïs Nin House of Incest Winter of Artifice Delta of Venus Little Birds White Stains Auletris Edith Wharton Beatrice Palmato CHAPTER 11: MY SECRET GARDEN: GERMAN Unika Zürn Dark Spring Elfriede Jelinek Lust The Piano Teacher
In 1957, French critics started using the term Nouveau Roman (New Novel) to describe a group of young writers who were abandoning the idea of realism in the style of Balzac and Flaubert as well as naturalism in the style of Zola. The main proponents were considered to be Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. It was never a movement, the writers never shared a common style or drank together in the same Paris café, but they did share a rejection of the idea that the novelist somehow transfers universal psychological truths from
the real world to the reader: Flaubert said that the novelist carries a mirror along the road but these new novelists all agreed that the act of writing creates a form of reality rather than transmitting one from outside of itself. Claude Simon said: ‘There is no such thing as a “real” representation of “reality.” Except, perhaps, in algebraic formulae.’ And elsewhere Simon says: The text, which results from multiple combinations, is neither a ‘reproduction’ nor a part of ‘reality.’ It is in itself both ‘reality’
and a part of ‘reality…’ Writing does not reproduce, it produces (something that did not exist before having been written), but, and in this consists its ambiguous power, this product, a reality in itself, is at the same time in relation with the ‘reality’ that created it, and with all the connections that language can weave around it, across time and space. Similarly, in ‘The Novel as Research’ of 1968 (note the title: the nouveau romanciers all saw writing as a form of experiment), Michel Butor said that we are always surrounded by narratives, narratives that make our world as we know it rather than describing it. The novel is a particular form of narrative. And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our
family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading. Nathalie Sarraute, expressing an idea similar to Roland Barthes’ distinction between readerly and writerly texts, agreed that the nineteenth-century novel – the readerly text – did all the work for the reader, but that present-day novels needed to be writerly: not designed to comfort and pamper the reader but to make the reader participate actively in the process of creation. ‘The reader has to be creative when he is reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.’ And Marguerite Duras, who wrote extensively about her writing practice, as we will see later, said similarly: A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable layer... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see childhood through a child.
ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET
The primary spokesperson for the Nouveau Roman was Alain RobbeGrillet (1922-2008), who wrote several essays on the subject, collected in the book For a New Novel (Pour un Nouveau Roman), where he argues that each generation needs to reinvent the
novel, that traditional nineteenth century conventions of plot, structure and dialogue are not to be considered inviolable or universal; they are in fact obsolete. In ‘A Future for the Novel’ of 1956 he says that the novel ‘has fallen into such a state of stagnation – a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion – that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change.’ The future novel however, is already coming into existence: ‘this new literature is not only possible in the future, but is already being written: by novelists like the nouveau romanciers.’ This new novel will ‘represent – in its fulfilment – a revolution more complete than those which in the past produced such movements as romanticism or naturalism.’ Although he had already said, in ‘The Use of Theory’ in 1955, ‘I am not a theoretician of the novel,’ Robbe-Grillet did continue to theorise extensively, particularly criticising novelists who stuck to the nineteenth-century paradigm; due to the scientific and social developments in the twentieth century, not to mention two world
wars, that paradigm of society and morality had been shattered, split apart, like the atom. No one would dream of praising a musician for having composed some Beethoven, a painter for having made a Delacroix, or an architect for having conceived a Gothic cathedral. Many novelists, fortunately, know that the same is true of literature, that literature too is alive, and that
the novel, ever since it has existed, has always been new. How could its style have remained motionless, fixed, when everything around it was in evolution – even revolution – during the last hundred and fifty years? Flaubert wrote the new novel of 1860, Proust the new novel of 1910… After The Counterfeiters, after Joyce, after Nausea, we seem to be tending increasingly toward an age of fiction in which the problems of style and construction will be lucidly considered by the novelist, and in which critical preoccupations, far from sterilizing creation, can on the contrary serve it as a driving force. But although Robbe-Grillet criticises novelists who cling to the past, he does not offer any prescriptions for how the novel should proceed; it is up to each individual novelist to find his or her own form of expression. ‘As for saying where the novel is heading, no one, of course, can do so with certainty. Moreover, it is likely that different paths will continue to exist for the novel, in parallel.’
We saw in the earlier chapter about Catherine Robbe-Grillet that she and her husband Alain had a contract for submissive sexual services, like the one Leopold von Sacher-Masoch signed with Wanda, except that in their case the man, Alain was the sadist and she was the submissive, the masochist. We also saw that Catherine had the body of a young girl – at the time of writing, as we saw earlier, she still has. At eighty-three she now has her own submissive female slave and they perform rituals in a château not
unlike the one in Story of O where a submissive woman is tortured by sadists. (See the earlier chapter on O.) Alain’s obsessions – with girls and with sadism – start to emerge in his novels quite early on and become extreme with his last novel, as we shall see. Despite his predilections, which were well-known in his circle, Alain Robbe-Grillet was a leading and highly respected French intellectual – he was awarded the ultimate insider-establishment accolade by being inducted into the Académie Française in 2004 – but, as we have seen, being a fan of the Marquis de Sade was no barrier to joining French intellectual circles: Jean Paulhan, for whom Anne Desclos wrote Story of O (published in 1954), was a member also. And as Desclos wrote O for Paulhan, Catherine Robbe-Grillet wrote The Image (published in 1956), a novel about a submissive woman and a submissive girl, for Alain. One of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s chief innovations in the novel was the use of an ‘absent narrator’: a narrative first person voice that nevertheless does not – necessarily – represent an actual person speaking, but
seems more like an objective description of the action in a film or picture: some event in which the narrator is not involved. Sometimes in his works the narrator is in fact describing an image (a device that Catherine used in The Image, even before Alain had fully developed it). The novels often read like film scenarios; Alain was in fact involved in the making of films: he made several with himself as auteur and most famously collaborated with Alain Resnais on Last Year at Marienbad of 1961. Robbe-Grillet’s most famous saying is probably ‘the world is neither significant nor absurd. It is, quite simply.’ This reflects Sartre’s ‘Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose,’ from Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant), 1943. The new novelist therefore should not try to delve into the human soul and bring back from its depths the essential truths of humanity, the eternal significance of the world – it has none. Nor does the new novelist portray the absurdity, like Beckett, or alienation, like Brecht, of man’s position in
relation to the world (Waiting for Godot was published in French in 1952 and first produced in 1953, the year Beckett published The Unnameable, the last volume of his trilogy; Brecht died in 1956, while working on a response to Godot). The novelist’s job is simply to describe, as objectively and accurately as possible, the impenetrable ‘thingness’ of the external world, without trying to look behind the surface for hidden
meanings or eternal reality. This idea, of the thing in itself (Ding an sich) originates with Immanuel Kant, in the Prolegomena of 1783. Former philosophers claimed that the sensible world was an illusion. The intelligible world, they said, was real and actual. Critical philosophy, however, acknowledges that objects of sense are mere appearances, but they are usually not illusions. They are appearances of a thing in itself, which cannot be directly known. In Plato’s cave, all we can do is describe the shadows that the puppets make, we should not try to imagine the motivations of some imaginary puppeteer. RobbeGrillet said:
All at once the whole splendid construction collapses; opening our eyes unexpectedly, we have experienced, once too often, the shock of this stubborn reality we were pretending to have mastered. Around us, defying the noisy pack of our animistic or protective adjectives, things are there. Their surfaces are distinct and smooth, intact, neither suspiciously brilliant nor transparent. All our literature has not yet succeeded in eroding their smallest corner, in flattening their slightest curve. In 2007, six months before his death, after a long and distinguished career, Alain Robbe-Grillet published a work of extreme pornography, concerning the torture of young girls, inappropriately
titled A Sentimental Novel (Un Roman Sentimental). The sentimental novel was an eighteenth-century genre exemplified by Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Sentimental Education is a novel by Flaubert. Robbe-Grillet’s last novel is very unlike any of these, with their romantic and passionate heroes and heroine. It is far more sadistic – literally, in the sense of being like the work of Sade, especially 120
Days of Sodom – than any of RobbeGrillet’s previous work; no one saw it coming, though, looking back, there were plenty of clues. The critics were divided: out of respect for Robbe-Grillet’s earlier work they took it seriously, some admiring the quality of the writing and trying to ignore the horrifying events it depicts – Robbe-Grillet always had privileged style over content. But other critics, not to mention the public, generally treated it as the aberration of a mad old man – permissible because of his previous history but revolting and excessive nonetheless. In fact it was not so aberrant, it had not come out of nowhere. Looking back it is possible to see that all his previous work had been leading up to this point: the erotic lingering over descriptions of young women, often even cruelty and violence towards them, is often present even in his earlier novels and over time it turns into a sadistic voyeurism, reaching an inevitable conclusion in the appalling, sadistic paedophilia of A Sentimental Novel. With hindsight we can see an element of scopophiliac eroticism lurking behind the coldness of even
Robbe-Grillet’s earliest narrators: Jealousy of 1957 is based around the conceit that the French word jalousie means both jealousy and the venetian blind that a voyeur can look through. Sometimes there are eroticallycharged scenes involving violence and young girls that hint at the author’s lascivious obsession with ruined young bodies: in The Voyeur of 1958, a thirteen-year-old girl’s body is found in the sea, mutilated by spider crabs. There is a young girl in it called Violet Leduc. (Coincidence? Unlikely. We will look at Violette Leduc in a later chapter.) The narrator describes a photo of her – actually not her, or perhaps it is: this is the ultimate unreliable narrator: he is narrating a murder mystery but may actually be the murderer. The description makes her seem like an Alice Lidell figure (the inspiration for Lewis Carrol’s Alice, in the most famous photo of her), leaning against a tree in an attitude of ‘surrender and constraint’, though only in the narrator’s mind. Looking at her, he imagines her bound to the tree.
It was not Violet of course, but someone who looked very much like her – especially in her face, for the clothes in the picture were those of a child, in spite of the nascent outlines of the body wearing them, which might already be a young woman’s – in miniature… standing against the rectilinear trunk of a pine tree, her head leaning against the bark, her legs braced and slightly
spread, her hands clasped behind the small of her back. Her posture, an ambiguous mixture of surrender and constraint, made it look as if she might have been bound to the tree. Like many of Alain’s other girlchild figures, and Catherine Robbe-Grillet’s Anne, she is the perfect embodiment of the nymphet, a word coined by Nabokov in Lolita, published by Olympia Press in 1955, the year before they published Catherine’s The Image. Alain RobbeGrillet’s 1962 short story ‘The Secret Room’ (‘La Chambre Secrète’) also prefigures A Sentimental Novel, even containing a similar description of the space where a woman’s dead body lies, that the ‘absent’ narrator is looking at like
the fixed, unblinking eye of a camera. The scene, described as if it were a scenario for a film, is also similar to the one in the series of photographs of the bound and beaten Anne, another ‘sacrificial victim’, in The Image. The dimensions of this room are difficult to determine exactly; the body of the young sacrificial victim seems at first glance to occupy a substantial portion of it, but the vast size of the stairway leading down to it would imply rather that this is not the whole room, whose considerable space must in reality extend all around, right and left, as it does toward the faraway browns and blues among the columns standing in line, in every direction, perhaps toward other sofas, thick carpets, piles of cushions and fabrics,
other tortured bodies, other incense burners. It is also difficult to say where the columns or on the floor, suggests the direction of the rays. Nor is any window or torch visible. The milkwhite body itself seems to light the scene, with its full breasts, the curve of its thighs, the rounded belly, the full buttocks, the stretched-out legs, widely spread, and the black tuft of the exposed sex, provocative, proffered, useless now.
The narrator here shares the erotic excitement of seeing pale, violated, young female flesh streaked with bloodstains (the victims are always young and female) with several of Robbe-Grillet’s other male narrators (the narrators are always older and male). Through the detached, distanced narration, the author’s lascivious glee in the act of writing the scene clearly shows through. As with Sade, Genet and Leduc – who, as we will see wrote Thérèse and Isabelle with one hand – this text seems to be written to exorcise the masturbatory fantasies of the author at least as much as those of the reader. This immense silhouette hides most of the bare flesh over which the red stain, spreading from the globe of the breast, runs in long rivulets that branch out, growing narrower, upon the pale background of the bust and the flank. One thread has reached the armpit and runs in an almost straight line along the arm; others have run down toward the waist and traced out, along one side of the belly, the hip, the top of the thigh, a more random
network already starting to congeal. Three or four tiny veins have reached the hollow between the legs, meeting in a sinuous line, touching the point of the V formed by the outspread legs, and disappearing into the black tuft. Look, now the flesh is still intact: the black tuft and the white belly, the soft curve of the hips, the narrow waist, and, higher up, the pearly breasts rising and falling in time with the rapid breathing, whose rhythm
grows more accelerated. The man, close to her, one knee on the floor, leans farther over. The head, with its long, curly hair, which alone is free to move somewhat, turns from side to side, struggling; finally the woman’s mouth twists open, while the flesh is torn open, the blood spurts out over the tender skin, stretched tight, the carefully shadowed eyes grow abnormally larger, the mouth opens wider, the head twists violently, one last time, from right to left, then more gently, to fall back finally and become still, amid the mass of black hair spread out on the velvet. It is revealed in the last sentence of the story that the narrator has been describing a painting, a conceit, as we saw, that he may have borrowed from Catherine, and which will return in the late novel Repetition, as we will see in a moment. This is a perfect device for the objective, detached descriptive style of the absent narrator, though the author himself is clearly present, in his transparent desires.
In 1967, Alain told Catherine that he was renouncing sex completely to withdraw into a private literary, erotic world of his own, though his literary output continued to travel along roughly the same path: perhaps he now needed novelistic outlets for his fantasies even more than he had before. His 1970 novel Project for a Revolution in New York (Projet pour une Révolution à New York) also uses the device of a detached narrator coolly describing erotic scenes from pictures; in the first instance the picture appears to be in his own mind, made up from patterns on a wooden window frame. He is looking at an opaque window: there is so little light from the other side of the door, that nothing can be seen of what might or might not be inside.
The wood around the window is coated with a brownish varnish in which thin lines of a lighter colour, lines which are the imitation of imaginary veins running through another substance considered more decorative, constitute parallel networks or networks of only slightly diverging curves outlining darker knots, round or oval or even triangular, a group of changing signs in which I have discerned human figures for a long time: a young woman lying on her left side and facing me, apparently naked since her nipples and pubic hair are discernible; her legs are bent, the left one more than the right, its knee pointing forward, on the floor; the right foot therefore crosses over the left one, the ankles are evidently bound together, just as
for a play called The Blood of Dreams. The girl Laura, ‘suddenly frightened, turns around and sees, only a yard above her face, the man leaning over her whom she has not heard coming, but who suddenly overwhelms her with his motionless and threatening bulk.’ This man may or may not be the narrator, who describes her with the combination of cold detachment and erotic tenderness for young girls that we have already seen so often in RobbeGrillet’s other works.
the wrists are bound behind her back as usual, it would seem, for both arms disappear from view behind the upper part of the body: the left arm below the elbow and the right one just above it. As before, the girls involved are young and must be terrified. In one case it is later revealed that we have been looking at – or may have been looking at, nothing is certain in this novel of cracked windows and shifting narration – a theatre poster
She looks extremely young: perhaps sixteen or seventeen. Her hair is startlingly blonde; the loose curls frame her pretty, terrified face with many golden highlights caught in the bright illumination from the window, against which she is silhouetted. Her long legs are revealed as far as the upper part of the thighs, the already short skirt being raised still farther in her fall, which exposes and emphasises their lovely shape almost up to the pubic region, which can in fact be discerned in the shadows under the raised hem of the material.
In Recollections of the Golden Triangle of 1978, there is yet more abuse of young girls: the title in one sense refers to the pubic triangle of a ‘light-fleshed adolescent,’ whom the narrator appears to abduct in his car, where working carefully and precisely with one hand only (my left hand is still resting on the steering wheel) while leaning sideways
towards the languid, prostrate body, I slit the golden dress axially with a single stroke of the scalpel from the triangle of orange silk (drawn out sideways towards the hips), the top edge of which just discloses the beginning of a fleece of fair hair (also triangular although smaller in size and much closer to the equilateral model), right up to the throat, where a little cross comes into view, held around the neck by its slender chain. I proceed to part the two edges of the fringed rent that my blade has just opened up, I fold back the two flaps of material on either side, and I am able at first glance to verify three of my former hypotheses: the absence of any underwear or lingerie apart from the briefs already mentioned, the firmness of the young breasts, which even in the lying position fall only imperceptibly short of being perfectly hemispherical, and finally the uniform tone of skin that is remarkably fine, delicate, and soft to the touch.
Repetition of 2001, a kind of metaphysical spy novel set in a blasted Berlin of 1949, goes even further in terms of young girls being tortured and abused; it even contains a young girl called Gigi, the name of the abused/abuser daughter in A Sentimental Novel (also the name of a 1944 Colette novel about a young Parisian girl being brought up as a prostitute). She is introduced by the narrator as looking like ‘a statuette shaped just like a ravishing doll-child bursting into bloom.’ The narrator himself admits that she satisfies his ‘sexual fixations and deepest anatomical fetishes,’ but says that he is, ‘in matters of Eros, a champion of gentleness and harmless persuasion.’ This is of course not true: he directs her punishment by the police when it is discovered that she is not a virgin. (The police also punish young girls for supposed sexual misdemeanours in A Sentimental Novel.) I indicated by three extended fingers the degree of punishment deserved. With the skill of a dominatrix, the policewoman
immediately applied, on the slightly parted buttocks, three short, sharp strokes at regular intervals. The child reared back each time the whip bit into her flesh, opening her mouth in a spasm of pain, but resisted crying out or letting a moan be heard… I saw, from behind, the charming rump so freshly bruised: three very distinct, intersecting red lines, with not the slightest sign of a tear in the fragile skin, whose
satin texture I could now appreciate with the faintest of caresses. Soon, with my other hand, I introduced two, then three fingers into her vulva, which was delightfully moist, inciting me to caress the clitoris with delicacy, attentive deliberation, and entirely paternal kindness. Later on, the narrator discovers some pornographic drawings of Gigi, as the narrator had in The Image; there also, the images are of a progressively more sadistic nature. He describes them with his author’s usual detached, camera-lens style, though, unusually for a RobbeGrillet narrator, he admits at the end of one description to being excited. The second drawing is called The Stake, but this does not refer to the traditional pile of fagots on which witches were burned alive. The little victim, once again on her knees but directly on the tiles this time, her thighs virtually spread-eagled by their taut chains, is seen here in a threequarter view from behind, her bust leaning forward and her
arms pulled toward the column, where her hands, tied together at the wrists, are attached to an iron ring at shoulder height. Beneath her buttocks, facing the spectator (the painter, a smitten lover, a lascivious and refined torturer, an art critic . . .), gaping wide and emphasised by the powerfully arched loins, glows a brazier mounted on a sort of tripod in the form of a candlestick, resembling a perfume brazier, which slowly consumes the soft pubic mound, the inner thighs, and the whole perineum. Her head is lying on one side, tipped back, turning toward us a lovely face agonised by the intolerable progress of the fire that is devouring her, while from her fine parted lips escape long moans of pain, varying in strength and extremely exciting.
A SENTIMENTAL NOVEL
Even this is mild stuff compared to the later parts of A Sentimental Novel. As I said earlier, the critics were divided: some appreciated the quality of the writing but most thought that the book’s 239 numbered paragraphs, which involve the escalating sexual torture of young girls, becoming increasingly extreme as the book
goes on, were just the ravings of a dirty and perverted old man. Indeed, despite his reputation, no American publisher would at first touch it in English translation. It was eventually accepted by specialist publisher Dalkey Archive though the translator remained anonymous, despite attempts by the New Yorker to unmask her or him. Things start quite harmlessly, with a typical Robbe-Grillet absent narrator describing an idealised space similar to ones we have seen before in his work. The narrator is in the space but not of it and has no apparent awareness of how he (we assume it is a ‘he’, though there is no evidence) got there – wherever ‘there’ is. As in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable, the narrator may be dead, though he dismisses this idea quickly. The space at first seems to be indoors, but then the narrator sees a forest landscape of vertical and rectilinear trunks, a sort of basin of water so clear it becomes almost immaterial, an oblong widening of a limpid spring, deep as a bathtub or deeper even, set between grey rounded rocks, soft
to the touch, welcoming. A girl is sitting there on a stone polished with age, which to her represents the ideal bench, the water’s edge where her long legs dangle in the blue mirrored swirls of this lovely nymphaeum, as natural as it is picturesque, whose temperature must be identical to the air, and to the feminine charms themselves, undulating, liquid already, above the moving mirror and its unforeseen shivers. The fourteen-year-old girl is called AnnDjinna, or Gigi, and she might have walked in from a Pierre Louÿs antique fantasy. She is being instructed, and punished, by her father. Every time she makes a mistake she is beaten by a ‘fearsome baton that her father wields skilfully, artistically distributing the scarlet lines on the two ivory globes, Gigi proffers her bruised rear by an increasingly accentuated arching of her back, as she begins to weep soundlessly, tears
streaming down her pink cheeks.’ Her father’s friend Sorel (Julien Sorel is the character in Stendahl’s The Red and the Black) brings Gigi a present: a real live girl-doll for her to play with, Odile (the name of the Black Swan in Swan Lake), ‘thirteen years and eight months old, but endowed with various precocious charms,’ as a ‘pretty plaything.’ Gigi asks what kind of plaything? Sorel says, ‘the submissive object kind, for all uses.’ Gigi asks if she can play with her like her dolls. She won’t be in a position to object if I slap her for no reason, lick her luscious mouth, or even bite her too hard? I’ll dress her as it suits me, or else undress her completely to give her thrashings on her bottom, her belly and her crotch? She’ll let me do what I will even when I fondle the inside of her sex, gently or brutally? And to punish her, should it amuse me, I can hang her naked by one foot, the way I used to my
cute dollies in the old days, whom I would whip in that position till their delicious howls could be heard. The paragraphs soon descend from Pierre Louÿs to Sade, to the worst excesses of 120 Days of Sodom, where the horrors increase systematically, but these horrors continue to be narrated by the same flat-voiced, objective absent narrator, who in true Nouveau Roman style describes everything, however irrelevant, in exact, almost mathematically meticulous detail. There is scene after scene of torture, supposedly carried out by the police to extract confessions from women involved in vice, for example the twenty-year-old Blanche and her nineyear-old daughter Blandine, ‘jointly charged with running a clandestine prostitution operation.’
152. Hence, both have been placed on all fours atop the sharpened, cutting edge of a pair of thick, steel blades, horizontal and parallel, set a metre or slightly further apart, the child’s left ankle has been closely chained to the mother’s right ankle. Each woman’s other leg, pulled out laterally, not to the extreme, to obtain a symmetrical opening of their thighs… The soles of their feet are being burned by light touches from a red-hot poker. And grazing on any part of the plantar hollow is all that is needed for the two relatively free limbs, joined at the ankles, trembling in concert, and for the two vulvas to be carved further each time, spilling yet more fresh blood. 153. If someone wishes to rape them, they are removed from their tortured trestles and placed next to one another on a large bed with
white sheets, already patterned scarlet by the placement of their shredded sexes… When Gigi sees them, the next phase of their torture is about to begin, replacing the red-hot poker under the soles of their feet with long metal needles, transpiercing the relevant fleshly parts and the hypersensitive articulations of the two delicate bodies, which one might imagine still intact, were it not for two growing puddles of blood that a haemolytic agent prevents from coagulating, forming on the tiles right beneath the two tortured sexes. One can see, moreover, from time to time the scarlet liquid streaming down the vertical face of the steel blades, then drip, drop by drop, which Gigi appreciatively points out to her confidante. Note the use of the third person, cinematic ‘one might imagine’ and ‘one can see’ within the first person, absent narrator’s narrative, the hallmark of the dispassionate, detached, distant style of the Nouveau Roman. And this objective, camera-lens style of narration
remains intact through a succession of increasingly horrific scenes of incest, cannibalism, mutilation and torture, all involving young girls, that even the Marquis de Sade, not to mention Catherine Robbe-Grillet, might have found a bit de trop. Robbe-Grillet himself said, as did Sade, that he was merely describing the sexual fantasies he had had since he was around twelve years old, and had never acted them out. But then they all say that.
MARGUERITE DURAS I’ve talked a lot about writing. But I don’t know what it is. Marguerite Duras
Like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) wrote spare and elegant experimental prose and made spare and elegant experimental films; they both made their own films as auteur and also both collaborated with Alain Resnais – in Duras’ case on Hiroshima Mon
Amour of 1959. She was born Marguerite Donnadieu in what is now Saigon in what is now Vietnam, when it was a French colony. Her father went back to France and then died but she stayed there with her mother, who lost all their money in a bad financial investment, so that Marguerite grew up in poverty. She returned to France at the age of seventeen to attend university but before that she had had an affair as a young teenager with the son of a wealthy Chinese merchant, a theme that recurs throughout her work and is the basis for The Lover. During the Second World War Duras worked for the collaborationist Vichy government but at the same time was a member of the resistance, in the same cell as François Mitterrand, later president of France and a lifelong friend. She was also at one time a member of the French Communist Party, as, as we saw earlier, Henri Barbusse and Louis Aragon had been. Duras’ earlier works were written in the conventional nineteenthcentury style that Robbe-Grillet so disliked, but later she pared down her style to the cooler, more objective writing of the Nouveau
Roman. She became very concerned with the nature of the act of writing: in a late essay entitled ‘Writing’ (‘Écrire’) of 1993, Duras talks about writing alone in her house, how the act of writing and solitude for her are essential companions. In reading this rather poignant statement about the solitariness of artistic creativity, it is perhaps relevant to know that Duras was a long term alcoholic. It is in a house that one is alone. Not outside it, but inside. Outside, in the garden, there are birds and cats. And also once, a squirrel, and a ferret. One isn’t alone in a garden. But inside the house, one is so alone that one can lose one’s bearings. Only now do I realise I’ve been here for ten years. Alone. To write books that have
let me know, and others know, that I was the writer I am. How did that happen? And how can one express it? What I can say is that the kind of solitude I found in Neauphle was created by me. For me. And that only in this house am I alone. To write. To write, not as I had up until then, but to write books still unknown to me and not yet decided on by me and not decided on by anyone… The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write. When it loses its blood, its author stops recognising it… The person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others. That is one kind of solitude. It is the solitude of the
author, of writing… This real, corporeal solitude becomes the inviolable silence of writing. I have never spoken of this to anyone. By the time of my first solitude, I had already discovered that what I had to do was write… Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic. I did it. Writing never left me. Although she was mostly alone in the house, Duras had occasional lovers, but kept them well away from her writing, even though some of them were writers themselves. ‘I was rarely without at least one lover. They got used to the solitude in Neauphle. And its charm sometimes allowed them to write books in turn. I rarely gave those lovers my books to read. Women should not let their lovers read the books they write.’ Good advice perhaps, especially if those books contain strong erotic elements, though rather too late for Catherine Robbe-Grillet, Anne Desclos or Diane Bataille. The 1969 novel Destroy She Said (Detruire Dit-Elle) is written rather like a film scenario, with an absent narrator and objective descriptions;
Duras did in fact did make a film out of it herself at the time. At the end of the novel she includes a ‘Note for Performance’, containing suggestions for a stage performance, as she would later in The Malady of Death. It contains a couple of selfreferential in-jokes about writing: one character asks another who claims to be writing a book: ‘Would you make things up in your book?’ She replies, ‘No. I’d describe.’ And later, one character wonders why the others are looking so intently at his wife. ‘Literary reasons,’ one replies. ‘So my wife’s a character in a novel?’
he asks. ‘I don’t see what you could find to say about her. Of course I know novels don’t tell stories anymore… That’s why I hardly ever read them.’ Duras did an interview regarding the film of The Malady of Death with the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, (Cinema Notebooks), virtually the house journal of Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) filmmakers, of whom she was considered one. The interview concerned the making of the film and the relationship of film to the novel. She talks about her ‘desire that I always have to tear what has gone before to pieces.’ Destroy, the book Destroy, is a fragmented book from the novelistic point of view. I don’t think there are any sentences left in it. And there are directions that are mindful of scripts: ‘sunshine,’ ‘seventh day,’ ‘heat,’ etc.; ‘intense light,’ ‘dusk’ – do you see what I mean? These are usually stage directions. That is to say I would like the material that is to be read to be as free as possible of style; I can’t read
novels at all anymore. Because of the sentences… In fact this novel does have sentences, though not necessarily in the conventional sense of a meaning-conveying unit of grammar: they are like sketches for an unfinished, fragmentary novel rather than sentences in a finished work with a fixed, closed meaning: all the things the nouveau roman was in reaction against. In ‘Writing’ she says: ‘There should be a nonwriting, and it will come someday. A simple language without grammar. A form of writing consisting only of words. Words without grammar to sustain them, abandonment as soon as they have been written down.’ She did her best to make such a language.
THE RAVISHING OF LOL STEIN Writing isn’t just telling stories. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s telling everything at once. It’s the telling of a story, and the absence of the story. It’s telling a story through its absence. Lol V Stein is destroyed by the dance at S. Thala. Lol V Stein is created by the dance at S. Thala. The Ravishing of Lol Stein is a book apart, the only one of its kind. It separates the readers-cumwriters who have identified with L V Stein’s madness from those who have not. I’d like to draw a distinction between what I’ve said, and said several times, and what I haven’t said about the book. Here’s what I think I’ve said: during the
actual dance at S. Thala, Lol V Stein is so carried away by the sight of her fiancé and the stranger in black that she forgets to suffer. She doesn’t suffer at having been forgotten and betrayed. It’s because her suffering is suppressed that she later goes mad. You could put it differently and say that she realises her fiancé is being drawn towards another woman, and she completely identifies with this decision, although it’s against herself; and it’s because of this that she loses her reason… What I haven’t said is that all the women in my books, whatever their age, derive from Lol V Stein. Derive, that is, from a kind of selfforgetting. They see quite clearly and lucidly. But they’re imprudent, improvident. They all ruin their own lives… Lol V Stein.
Mad. Brought to a halt at the dance at S. Thala. She stops there. It’s the dance that grows, making concentric circles round her, bigger and bigger. Now the dance, the sound of the dance, has reached as far as New York. Now, of all the characters in my books, Lol V Stein comes top of the list. It’s a funny thing. She’s the one who ‘sells’ the best. My little madwoman.
That quote was from a book of conversations with Duras published in 1987 as Practicalities (La Vie Matérielle). The basic plot of The Ravishing of Lol Stein (Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein), 1964 could have come from Balzac, a Maupassant story, or even Jane Austen. There are almost no indications as to when or where it is set: apart from a point where someone puts on a record, it could be set in any time. There is also no feeling of place; though the names of some of the people and places sound as though they may be English: one of the two locations, Uxbridge, is a real place, west of London, but the other locations, South Thala and Town Beach, do not really sound like any real place. At the beginning, a teenage Lol (short for Lola) and her friend Tatiana are at a ball. Lol’s fiancé asks a very attractive older woman to dance and leaves with her – permanently. Lol, shattered by the experience, withdraws into herself, though she eventually marries someone else and moves away, living a quiet, if obsessively-ordered, middle-class life with a boring husband, children and servants.
Duras says she is mad, but she does not seem so, certainly not in the Miss Havisham sense. She may represent Duras herself, but she is neither the madwoman in the attic nor the angel in the house, whom Virginia Woolf said all female writers have to kill. Lol seems rather to have become a void, a nothingness, to have no interests, no inner life, certainly no passions; all she ever does is go out for a walk every day. After ten years of this lifeless, listless life she moves back with her husband to the place where she was humiliated and meets Tatiana again, together with her husband and their friend, who is also Tatiana’s lover. So far, so conventional romantic novel, though the language in which it is told is spare and elliptical in the Nouveau Roman way. It also frequently questions the nature of its own narrative; we are continually made to wonder who the narrator is; he seems to be in the story rather
than a disembodied, absent narrative voice. He (it turns out to be a he) often says things like: ‘this I invent, this I see:’ or ‘this is what I surmise:’ Then, a third of the way through the book, the narrator introduces himself – literally; the reason Lol appears to have had no inner life may not be due to her mental state but simply because the narrator has had no access to it. The narrator tells us: ‘I am thirty-six years old, a member of the medical profession. I have been living in South Tahla only for a year. I am in Peter Beugner’s [Tatiana’s husband] section at the State Hospital. I am Tatiana Karl’s lover.’ He does not give us his name, but we already know he must be Jack Hold. He makes it clear to us, though not to her at this stage, that he wants to possess Lol, though he is still passionate about Tatiana. At some points the narrator refers to himself in third person, especially
when there is an act of passion occurring. Without so much as the slightest preliminary caress, Jack Hold came over to Tatiana Karl. Jack Hold possessed Tatiana Karl, ruthlessly. She offered no resistance, said nothing, refused no demand, marvelled at the intensity of his passion. The pleasure was great, and mutual. That moment when Lol was completely forgotten, that extended flash, in the unvarying time of her watchful wait, Lol wanted that moment to be, without harbouring the slightest hope of perceiving it. It was. It may be that Lol can see Jack and Tatiana in the hotel room that they use from the field of rye outside, where she stands, watching, in the dark; Since Jack is the narrator, he may be inventing this, but
he also tells Lol about what happens when they are together; again Jack switches into the third person. He tells Lol Stein: ‘Tatiana removes her clothes, and Jack Hold watches, stares with interest at this woman who is not the woman he loves. As each article of clothing falls, he recognises still more of this insatiable body to whose existence he is quite indifferent. He has already explored this body, he knows it better than does Tatiana herself. And yet his eyes remained fixed upon its hollows, where the skin is thin, of a white which subtly follows the lines of the body, shades either to a pure arterial blue or to a sunny brown. He stares at her until the identity of each line is blurred, and even the entire body.’ But Tatiana is speaking: ‘But Tatiana is saying something,’ Lol Stein murmurs.
To make her happy, I would invent God if I had to. ‘She utters your name.’ I did not invent that. He hides Tatiana Karl’s face beneath the sheets, and thus has her headless body at his disposal. He turns the body this way and that, raises it, does with it whatever he desires, spreads the limbs or draws them in close, stares fixedly at its irreversible beauty, enters it, remains
motionless, awaits being trapped into forgetfulness, forgetfulness is there. ‘Ah, how beautifully Tatiana knows how to let herself go, it’s absolutely amazing, it must be extraordinary.’ This rendezvous was a source of great pleasure to Tatiana and him alike, greater than usual. ‘Doesn’t she say anything else?’ ‘Beneath the sheet that covers her, she talks of Lol Stein.’ The narrator pictures Lol, ‘her nakedness next to mine, complete, for the first time oddly enough, in a rapid flash, just long enough to ascertain whether I would be able to bear it if that moment should ever come. Lol Stein’s body, so distant, and yet so inextricably wedded to itself, solitary.’ The moment does come and he is able to bear it. I’m obliged to undress her. She won’t do it herself. Now she is naked. Who is there in the bed? Who does she think she is? Stretched out on the bed, she does not move a muscle. She is worried. She is motionless, remains there where I have
placed her. Her eyes follow me across the room as I undress, as though I were a stranger. Who is it? The crisis is here. An attack brought on by the way we are now, here in this room, she and I alone… I lie down beside her, beside her closed body. I recognise the smell of her. I caress her without looking at her. ‘You’re hurting me.’ I keep on. By the feel of my
fingers I recognise the contours of a woman’s body. I draw flowers upon it. Her whimpered resistance ceases. She is no longer moving, now doubtless remembers that she is here with Tatiana Karl’s lover. But now at last she begins to doubt that identity, the only identity familiar to her, the only one she has used at least as long as I have known her. She says: ‘Who is it?’ She moans, asks me to tell her. I say: ‘Tatiana Karl, for example.’ Exhausted, at the end of my strength, I ask her to help me. She helps me. She knew. Who was it before me? I shall never know. I don’t care. Later, shouting, she insulted me, she begged me, she implored me to take her again and in the same breath said to leave her alone, like a hunted animal trying to flee the room, the bed, coming back to let herself be captured, wily and knowing, and now there was no longer any difference between her and Tatiana Karl except in
her eyes, free of remorse, and in the way she referred to herself – Tatiana does not state her own name – and in the two names she gave herself: Tatiana Karl and Lol Stein.
The book ends as, like before, the narrator is in the hotel room with Tatiana and Lol is in the field of rye outside, watching in the dark.
THE LOVER
Duras’ most popular and most famous work The Lover (L’Amant), 1984 won the Prix Goncourt, has been made into a film and translated into forty-three languages. It is an autobiographical story about her young teenage years in French Indochina; in fact the narrator denies that this is the story of her life, though it does follow the known facts about Duras’ early years. ‘The story of my life does not exist. Does
not exist. There is never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.’ Duras wrote this book when she was seventy, though, as she says, not to try to recapture an earlier time in the Proustian sense, as Violette Leduc did so successfully (we will look at her later), but in a quest for ‘vanity and void’. As in many of her other works, Duras foregrounds the act of writing: she already knows, at the age of fifteen and a half, that she wants to be a writer. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realise that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing. That if it’s not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement. But usually I have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there
seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read. Her mother is very unsympathetic to her ambitions. ‘She is against it, it’s not worthy, it’s not real work, it’s nonsense. Later she said: A childish idea.’ Her family are very poor, the father has gone back to France – as it turns out, to die – and they have had to sell everything they have to survive. The only thing the narrator
has to sell is her own body. ‘At the age of fifteen I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure.’ For the last three years, she says, men have been looking at her in the street, ‘and my mother’s men friends have been kindly asking me to tea with them while their wives are out playing tennis at the Sporting Club.’ The only thing left is this girl, she’s growing up, perhaps one day she’ll find out how to bring in some money. That’s why, though she doesn’t know it, that’s why the mother lets the girl go out dressed like a child prostitute. And that’s why the child already knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money. That makes her mother smile. Even at this age, she already knows ‘a thing or two.’ She knows that it is not clothes or make up that make women attractive. She knows about women who wait, who ‘dream of romance.’ Some of them are ‘deserted for a young maid who keeps her mouth shut. Ditched.’ Some of them ‘go mad,’ like Lol
Stein. They betray themselves, she says with a wisdom well beyond her years; this ‘always struck me as a mistake, an error.’ You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it. On the ferry she uses to cross the river, she meets a young man – though still much older than her – who is the son of a wealthy local Chinese merchant, just back from Paris where he was a student. He offers her a ride in his big black car. ‘The door shuts. A barely discernible distress suddenly
seizes her, a weariness, the light over the river dims, but only slightly.’ But the girl knows that she is the one in control. ‘From the first moment she knows more or less, knows he’s at her mercy. And therefore that others beside him may be at her mercy too if the occasion arises.’ He takes her to his place. She says: I’d rather you didn’t love me. But if you do, I’d like you to do as you usually do with women. He looks at her in horror, asks, is that what you want? She says it is… He says: You’ve come here with me as you might have gone anywhere with anyone. She says she can’t say, so far she’s never gone into a bedroom with anyone. She tells him she doesn’t want him to talk, what she wants is for him to do as he usually does with the women he
brings to his flat. She begs him to do that. He’s torn off the dress, he throws it down. He’s torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed. And there he turns away and weeps. And she, slow, patient, draws him to her and starts to undress him. With her eyes shut. Slowly. He makes as if to help her. She tells him to keep still. Let me do it. She says she wants to do it. And she does. Undresses him. When she tells him to, he moves his body on the bed, but carefully, gently, as if not to wake her. The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle, he may have been ill, maybe
convalescent, he’s hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex, he is weak, probably a helpless prey to insult, vulnerable. She doesn’t look him in the face. Look at him at all. She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love. And, weeping, he makes love. At first, pain. And then the pain is possessed in its turn, changed, slowly drawn away, borne towards pleasure, clasped to it. The sea, formless, simply beyond compare… I didn’t know you bled. He asks me if it hurt, I say no, he says he is glad. He wipes the blood away, washes me. I watch him. Little by
little he comes back, becomes desirable again. She goes to sleep; when she wakes he has had a shower, he ‘smells pleasantly of English cigarettes, expensive perfume, honey, his skin has taken on the scent of silk, the fruity smell of silk tussore, the smell of gold, he’s desirable.’ She tells him of her desire; he tells her she must wait a while but says that he knew from the first time he saw her crossing the river, ‘that I’d be like this after my first lover, that I’d love
love, he says he knows now I’ll deceive him and deceive all the men I meet with.’ She tells him he must ‘possess’ her again. He calls me a whore, a slut, he says I’m his only love, and that’s what he ought to say, and what do you say when you just let things set themselves, when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes, and then everything is right, and nothing is wasted, the waste is covered over and all is swept away in the torrent, in the force of desire… I asked him to do it again and again. Do it to me. And he did, did it in the unctuousness of blood. And it really was unto death. It has been unto death. Of course the man’s father ‘won’t let his son marry the little white whore,’ he would ‘rather see him dead.’ Her mother is terrified about the danger of her disgraced daughter ‘never getting married, never having a place in society, of being defenceless against it, lost, alone.’ The mother ‘punches me, slaps me, undresses me,’ saying that she can smell the
Chinese man’s scent, ‘looks for suspect stains on my underwear, and shouts, for the whole town to hear, that her daughter’s a prostitute.’ Mother asks, ‘is it only for the money you see him? I hesitate, then say it is only for the money.’ The only other character the narrator mentions, and the only one she names, is a school friend, Hélène. ‘She weeps up against me, and I stroke her hair, her hands, tell her I’m going to stay here with her. She doesn’t know she is very beautiful, Hélène Lagonelle.’ (It is interesting that, in Duras’ novels the characters tend to have either have no names at all or are always referred to by both their names.) Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin is soft as that of certain fruits, you can
almost grasp her, she is almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvellous dream of putting her to death with your own hand… I would like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers. I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle. I am worn out with desire… I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Lagonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.
A pleasure unto death. But this remains a fantasy, all the while ‘the little slut goes to have her body caressed by a filthy Chinese millionaire. And she goes to the French high school too with little white girls.’ Of course, in this racist society, none of the girls will speak to her, but she recognises this apartness in someone else, someone she does not know but only observes. Her ‘isolation brings back a clear memory of the lady in Vinh Long,’ whom the girl sees on her terrace when she is coming home from her catechism class with her brother. She identifies with the older lady. Both isolated. Alone, queen-like. Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death, as they both call it, and to the mysterious death of lovers without love. That’s what it’s all about: this hankering for death.
After she leaves Indochina to attend university in France she does not ‘go near another man for two years,’ though this ‘mysterious fidelity’ is only to herself, not to the young Chinese man. As for him, he soon marries the woman his father tells him to – a marriage traditionally arranged between families of a similar class and from the same place in China. But the narrator has mythologised her relationship to
him; even though before he met her he had had many women in Paris, she still sees herself as being his one great passion. It must have been a long time before he was able to be with her, to give her the heir to their fortunes. The memory of the little white girl must have been there, lying there, the body, across the bed. For a long time she must have remained the queen of his desire, his personal link with emotion, with the immensity of tenderness, the dark and terrible depths of the flesh. Then the day must have come when it was possible. The day when desire for the little white girl was so strong, so unbearable that he could find her whole image again as in a great and raging fever, and penetrate the other woman with his desire for her, the white child. It later turns out that she may have been right to mythologise their relationship: years later, after the war, he comes to Paris with his wife and phones her. The book ends:
He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she’d begun writing books, he’d heard about it through her mother whom he’d met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he’d been grieved for her. Then he didn’t know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he loved her until death. Neuphle-le Château – Paris February – May 1984
THE MALADY OF DEATH In The Unavowable Community, [Maurice] Blanchot mentions the novella by Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death. In this text, a woman agrees to sleep with a man for money. It’s the man who asks to pay; the reader doesn’t know why the woman agrees, if not perhaps to allow this man to attain a thing to which he has no access, that is, love or jouissance. In Duras’ tale, we can never know if he attains this but we do know the woman comes (jouit). Blanchot does not recount the passage that describes the woman in the process of having an orgasm (jouir), but the one of the man’s gaze at the woman’s jouissance. It is the startled gaze
of someone who sees jouissance but can neither attain it nor participate in it. I don’t know what Duras had in mind, but I note a coherence with other texts by her that seems to say that only the woman truly achieves jouissance – or else it is through the feminine that there is access to jouissance for a man or for a woman. Blanchot draws the conclusion that jouissance is necessarily solitary, even though it comes from a relationship with an other. He writes: ‘pleasure, essentially, is what escapes.’ We can see a contradiction in this: If pleasure is what escapes, then jouissance is impossible. But I think that Blanchot means the opposite: Pleasure escapes, but it is in the escaping that there is pleasure. And that is where we find the other: Escaping outside of oneself sends us to
the other, the one to whom I say ‘Come!’ and who answers me. This is a quote from Coming (Jouissance) by Jean Luc Nancy, possibly the only philosophical work entirely devoted to the orgasm. Duras’ short, spare, strippeddown novella The Malady of Death (La Maladie de la mort), 1986 has no names and no back stories. It is written in the second person – a very difficult technique to sustain –
where the person being addressed is a man: ‘you’. The woman in the story, like O, and like Lol Stein, is a nameless, empty vessel. The man does not have a name because the man is you, the reader. Note here the use of the modal verbs ‘may have’ and ‘would have,’ grammatically sometimes known as ‘modals of lost opportunities.’ You wouldn’t have known her, you’d have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in the street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its load of tears. You may have paid her. May have said: I want you to come every night for a few days. She’d have given you a long look and said in that case it would be expensive. And then she says: What is it you want? You say you want to try, try it, try to know, to get used to that body, those breasts, that scent. To beauty, to the risk of having children implicit in that body, to
that hairless unmuscular body, that face, that naked skin, to the identity between that skin and the life it contains. You say you want to try, for several days perhaps. Perhaps for several weeks. Perhaps even for your whole life. Try what? she asks. Loving, you answer. Like O, she is not only nameless but she must also agree to be voiceless and to have no will of her own. ‘You say she mustn’t speak, like the women of her ancestors, must yield completely to you and your will, be entirely submissive.’ Occasionally the absent narrator slips, almost unnoticed, into the first person. ‘Perhaps you get from her a pleasure you’ve never known before. I don’t know. Nor do I know if you hear the low, distant murmur of her pleasure through her breathing, through the faint rattle going back and forth between her mouth and the outside air. I don’t think so.’ The woman tells you that you have ‘the malady’, which is ‘getting more and more of a hold on you.’ You ask what the
malady is but she says ‘she can’t say, yet.’ There was perhaps an implication in the opening paragraph, with the mention of ‘the risk of having children implicit in that body’ and ‘that hairless unmuscular body,’ that ‘you’ have never been with a woman before, though you may perhaps have been with a man. Duras confirms this in one of the conversations in Practicalities: If you had a mind to generalise you might say The Malady of
Death is a preliminary version of Blue Eyes, Black Hair. [A 1986 novel about a gay man who invites a woman to his room to look at her.] But The Malady of Death is an indictment, and there’s nothing at all like that in the longer book. Other people, from Peter Handke to Maurice Blanchot, have seen The Malady of Death as being against men in their relationship with women. If you like. But if I say men have taken such an interest in the book it’s because they’ve sensed there’s something more to it than that – something of particular concern to them. It’s extraordinary that they should have seen it. But it’s also extraordinary that some of them haven’t seen that in The Malady of Death as well as a man in
relation to women, and seen through that, there is a man in relation to men. In the same conversation, Duras makes it clear that she by no means disapproves of homosexuality, if only because it is perhaps less doomed than the alternative. Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire. In heterosexual love there is no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it’s the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur. But in homosexual love the passion is homosexuality itself. What a homosexual loves, as if it were his lover, his country, his art, his land, is homosexuality.
The possible homosexuality of the ‘you’ that is being addressed is never directly implied again, but the male – especially homosexual male – fear of the vagina that we have encountered several times in Text Acts is referred to, as well as the idea that a woman is an empty vessel that needs to be filled by a man. One time when she is asleep, she is in ‘a dream of happiness at being full of a man, of you, or of someone else, or someone else again. You weep.’
Night after night you enter the dark of her sex, almost unwittingly take that blind way. Sometimes you stay there; sleep there, inside her, all night long, so as to be ready if ever, through some involuntary movement on her part or yours you should feel like taking her again, filling her again, taking pleasure in her again. But only with a pleasure, as always, blinded by tears. Then it’s almost dawn. Then there’s a dark light in the room, of indeterminate hue. Then you switch some lights on, to see her. Her. See what you’ve never seen before, the hidden sex, that which swallows up and holds without seeming to. See it like this, closed up around its own sleep. She says: Look. She parts her legs, and in the hollow between you see the dark night at last. You say: It was there, the dark night. It’s there. She says: Come. You do. Having entered her, you go on weeping. She says: Don’t cry anymore. She says: Take me, so it may have been done.
You do so, you take. It is done. She goes back to sleep.
Again, in Practicalities, Duras confirms the idea, most strongly expressed in fiction in Story of O, and theorised by Angela Carter, of the essential emptiness of being a woman, of being a nothingness, of the vagina being merely a receptacle,
a lack, an empty vessel needing to be filled by a man, and thus of the woman in pornography being merely a penis-sized lacuna in the text. Desire for our lover hits us in the vaginal cavity, which reverberates like an echo chamber within our bodies. A place from which our lover’s penis is absent. We can’t deceive ourselves – can’t imagine another penis in the place meant for just one man, the one who’s our lover. If another man touches us we cry out in disgust. We possess our lover just as he possesses us. We possess each other. And the site of the possession is one of absolute subjectivity. It’s there that our lover deals us the strongest blows, which we implore him to deal so that they may echo all through the body and through our emptying mind. It’s there that we want to die. (Interestingly, although Duras talks sympathetically, even perhaps jealously, of the relationships between homosexual men, she never discusses lesbianism; does the same hold true for them? She doesn’t say.)
Like the body of O, who has many men inside her – Anne Desclos clearly could imagine them ‘in the place meant for just one man’ – like that of Catherine Robbe-Grillet’s Anne and those of Alain RobbeGrillet’s abused young women, the body of the woman here is ‘completely defenceless, smooth from face to feet. It invites strangulation, rape, ill usage, insult, shouts of hatred, the unleashing of deadly and unmitigated passions.’ Her only function in life – or at least, in the text – is to be abused. But ‘you’, the reader do not abuse this anonymous woman. Because ‘you’ wouldn’t, would you? ‘You’ are not an abuser. But Duras thinks that perhaps you are and you would, or at least that you would like to: ‘I think men’s behaviour to women is generally brutal and high-handed. But that doesn’t necessarily mean men are brutal and high-handed –
only that men are like that in the context of the heterosexual couple.’ Leaning over her, motionless, you look at her. You know you can dispose of her in whatever way you wish, even the most dangerous. But you don’t. Instead you stroke her body as gently as if it ran the risk of happiness. Your hand is over the sex, between the open lips, it’s there it strokes. You look at the opening body and what surrounds it, the whole body. You don’t see anything. Of course, to ‘you’, being a man, an affair is not real unless it is discussed with other men; Duras says: ‘If you’re a man your favourite company – that of your heart, your flesh and your sex, is the company of men.’ The evening that she goes, you tell the story of the affair in a bar.
At first you tell it as if it were possible to do so, then you give up. Then you tell it laughing, as if it were impossible for it to have happened, impossible for you to have invented it. In the end, the narrator tells you: ‘All you remember of the whole affair are certain words she said in her sleep, the ones that tell you what’s wrong with you: the malady of death… Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.’ Modals of lost opportunities, indeed. Although the woman may have told you what the malady of death is, the narrator doesn’t, so we still don’t know. There may or may not be a reference here to Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death, 1849: the usual French translation of the title is La Maladie à la mort, very similar to Duras’ title La Maladie de la mort. ‘The three forms of despair: not being conscious of having a self, not willing to be oneself, but also despair at willing to be oneself. Despair is “sickness unto death.”’ At the end, the narrator switches to what seems to be an instruction to a publisher or stage director, as she
had done at the end of Destroy, She Said. The Malady of Death could be staged in the theatre. The young woman of the paid nights should be lying on some white sheets in the middle of the stage. She might be naked. A man would walk back and forth around her, telling the story. Only the woman would speak her lines from memory. The man never would. He would read the text, either standing still or walking about around the young woman. The man the story is about would never appear. Even when he speaks to the young woman he does so only through the man who reads his story. Her instructions to the actors are that acting must be ‘replaced here by reading,’ as the text ‘would be completely nullified if it were spoken theatrically.’ And then finally, the last paragraph of the novella goes: if I ever filmed this text I’d want the weeping by the sea to be shot in such a way that the white
turmoil of the waves is seen almost simultaneously with the man’s face. There should be a correlation between the white of the sheets and the white of the sea. The sheets should be a prior image of the sea. All this by way of general suggestion.